GluttonyReaper

The most obvious problem here (even for mods) is the lack of ability of the player to mitigate the problem - if you're landing or docking, you've got some visual cues to fall on as a backup if you work out something's wrong, but there's no such thing for interplanetary transfers or orbital insertion. You're totally reliant on the displays and orbital info 99% of the time in space, and ultimately it would just lead to things appearing to go strangely wrong with no clear explanation from the player's point of view.

I personally quite like the one bundled with Kerbalism, but obviously you need to download the rest of Kerbalism to get it.

My immediate thought is something like a planet-spanning algae colony embedded into a rocky planet. If they all share nutrients, some of them can specialise into transmitting 'data' from one place of the planet to another (i.e. neurones), and eventually that might evolve into some kind of actual intelligence. In the end, you might end with something akin to a human mind, but much much slower, with processes taking days rather than milliseconds. As for evolutionary pressure, the planet could have some extreme weather cycles that are perhaps harmful to the algae, forcing it to develop a kind of weather prediction system to survive as a colony. If it 'detects' a storm or something in one location, it can guess where it might go next and send a 'message' for the algae in the path to prepare in some or another.

I'm still not super clear what the utility of catching the upper stage with a tower is - presumably for an actual mission you'd catch the lower and upper stages separately, so you'd have to mount them back together either way. Is it just about saving the weight of the landing legs?

Short answer - the ion engine. It's got a higher ISP and it's lighter, so if you only care about dV, that's what you should go with. However, there are some caveats. First, the ion engine has a tibblingly low thrust, so it's (almost) useless for landers... and can result in some painfully long transfer burns. Second, it needs a supply of electric charge - if you're not going too far away from the Sun, you can use solar panels, but regardless you're going to have to carry some extra weight. This can be somewhat mitigated by throttling down, but then you end up with an even lower thrust. Thirdly, don't necessarily rule out chemical engines straight away - if your payload is small, a tiny engine and a big tank can go a long way, especially with the benefit of staging.

The intended behaviour is that precision mode tries to "balance" your RCS for translation by scaling the thrust of each thruster based on how far from the COM it is. The other thing it seems to do is "ramp" your RCS thrust - if you just tap a translation key, it'll only do the tiniest of bursts, you need to hold it for higher power. In general though, it tends to result in lower RCS thrust overall anyway... I'm not sure how it behaves if you have a really weird RCS layout.

1.3.1 was a full update in the end - there was apparently supposed to be an upgrade to the 1.0 demo to bring it up to date with current versions (see this post)... but as far as I can tell, it was never actually released.

All I'm hearing is that is would be trivial to install hydrolox rocket boosters on our cars...

Is it even unlockable? I thought it was just a static asset that just behaves like an easter egg (unlike the sites added in 1.12)

Sure, but is that to do with how their feet are designed or to do with how big and muscular they are (as well as having an extra pair of legs)? I'm not sure transplanting the same design onto a humanoid body would make them run faster. I don't see why not. Like you've shown, the elephant foot is basically the same as ours, just with more padding to accommodate their greater weight. The human heel bone is surprisingly high up, the rest is just fat.

This isn't quite correct (I'm definitely no expert on GR or quantum mechanics, but I think I recall how this works): thermal radiation is an EM wave, EM waves are affected by gravity. This was one of the big revelations of general relativity - by treating gravity as something that "warps" spacetime rather than just being an attractive force, the path that EM waves can effectively be "bent" as they try to follow the distortion caused by a massive object. This is something that's most obvious with gravitational lensing. Black holes are just an extreme case of this. They distort spacetime around them sufficiently that even the speed of light isn't enough to avoid a collision with whatever singularity exists at their center.

As already mentioned, you get rotation just from angular momentum - the host clouds that stars form from can be on the order of ~few parsecs, and individual "clumps" that go on to form single star systems can easily be a few thousand AU wide. The closer in you draw in gas, the faster it rotates, because you're conserving angular momentum, and some of that gas has a long way to fall and thus a lot of momentum to contribute (the classic example of this is an ice skater drawing their arms in to pull themselves into a fast spin) Funnily enough, I think you've described the generally accepted idea here - gas and dust particles collide constantly as they're drawn in closer, transferring angular momentum between each other until they've formed a natural distribution. The actual plane of rotation will depend purely on which angular momentum "wins" out in the end. Also to note: you don't need all of your gas and dust to hit orbital speed... in fact, most of it won't. Anything that's moving too slowly will just fall and become part of the star, and anything moving too fast will be ejected - whatever small fraction is left is plenty to make up a reasonable-sized disc. The formation of discs is... somewhat more complicated. You get some of the disc shape from your rotation and friction, in the same way you get oblateness in planets - i.e. spinning your gas/dust clump forces some of the material to the plane of rotation, and then that overdensity creates a zone of higher friction that 'traps' particles as they cross though that plane, creating a greater overdensity... and so on. The factor you might have missed though, is magnetic fields. There's still plenty we don't understand in terms of detailing exactly how magnetic fields contribute to disc formation (and star & planet formation in general) so I'd recommend having a read around, but a simple model is enough to understand how it can help: A spherical gas clump forms with a close-to-linear magnetic field running through it, parallel to the axis of rotation (which comes first is beside the point for now...). The gas is partially charged, so is affected by the magnetic field. Crucially, charged particles really don't like moving across magnetic fields, rather preferring to move along them. In this case, it means the magnetic field helps to resist collapses along two dimensions, but has little effect in the remaining third dimension. Thus, you collapse your clump into a 2D shape... a disc. There's plenty more complexity here that I haven't touched on (see: the magnetic breaking catastrophe) and some fun side-effects that we can more directly observed (e.g. outflows), but in general star formation just seems to be a very complicated problem. Regardless, there's enough mechanics to toy with that I don't think you need to toy with extra material injections or anything to form planets.

If you've done an Eve flyby already, you can definitely give sending a one-way probe to Eve's surface a go - it shouldn't take much more fuel because you can use a heat shield + parachute to deorbit.

For future reference, this is isn't quite true - as far as I can tell, the game checks every frame if each craft is inside a planet or not, and decides whether to treat it as "crashed" based on that. To get a craft to phase through a planet, it needs to be moving fast enough that it's outside the planet on one frame, then travels far enough along its orbit that it goes all the way through and out again before the next frame. This is usually done by whacking up the timewarp all the way when on a collision course (easiest done in the tracking station to get around the usual limits), and actually works even if you're directly looking at it.

Honestly I wonder what KSP2 could have been if it was handed to a team with less familiarity (or perhaps just much less attachment) with KSP1. Other than proper orbital mechanics, a few art details, and the Kerbals themselves... there isn't really any mechanics from KSP1 that couldn't have been tossed away, replaced, or in many cases just added where it was very lacking. Unfortunately a lot of the choices made for KSP2 seemed to have purely been made on the basis of "well that's how KSP1 did it" - e.g. I'm not convinced there was ever any consideration for whether the science system (or some variation thereof) was actually the best choice for a cohesive game. Perhaps the planned features that were never finished could have been different, but things didn't really get far enough to present anything that I think was "surprising". Tangentially, it's neat to imagine how KSP could have turned out if it had stuck to its more cartoonish roots rather than getting swept up in the realism chase. Think of it - setting up a resource networks to harvest rocket fuel from Eve's oceans to fuel your motherships that you've constructed from Dunanian ores...